Wide market adoption of various incompatible or weakly compatible wireless devices has significantly increased interference in the public bands utilized by wireless local area networks (WLANs). When devices using multiple protocols coexist in the same frequency band they may cause significant mutual service disruptions. While some technologies, such as WiFi™, implement measures to avoid signal collisions when other devices are transmitting, other technologies allow transmitting regardless of the medium status. Some wireless devices may also be viewed as security problems, either due to interference with mission critical WLANs, or because they may allow unsecured leakage of confidential information (for example, wireless cameras, microphones, data bridges, etc.). There are also non-standard forms of WLANs that operate on non-standard channels in the same frequency band as standard WLANs. Scanning the frequency band with device using a standard WiFi chipset to detect such non-standard WLAN equipment would be time-prohibitive. In addition, there are WiFi chipsets that have proprietary modes of operation that only such chipsets can recognize. For these reasons, it has become increasingly important to detect, identify and locate non-standard WLAN and other wireless devices.
Utilizing a network of distributed wireless sensors capable of detecting various protocols and device types is the first step. But a workable system requires an ability to correlate detections of the same device by multiple sensors, while maintaining an ability to differentiate between unique but similar devices. Without such capability, network administrators will be overwhelmed with redundant detection reports of the same device. Furthermore, without correlating device detections, it is difficult to implement advanced system features such as locating devices based on signal triangulation/trilateration/receive signal strength fingerprinting, or to understand the distribution of wireless interference devices in a controlled territory.